heat

Or, perhaps, the flogging will continue until morale improves. It has been over 100 degrees fahrenheit every day for a solid month. Too hot for bees, even, so I have some anxiety about the fate of the garden this year. Anyway. After all the other fun and frivolity of the last several months, the heat and the, of course, HUGE fires have people walking around here like literal zombies. A quick survey of media will remind one, however, that the entire planet is engulfed in this sort of beyond challenging situation and it can be hard to know what to do in any way, shape, or form.

It’s been quite the endeavor, as we all know, to keep a minimal level of sanity not to mention engagement. Nothing is working, in terms of daily activities, the way one had become accustomed to. Let’s just say. I was intrigued, for example, to find out that in addition to potatoes and chardonnay, there are also no Rolaids to be found hereabouts. I did find a quite splendid ten inch tall silver colored elephant watering can, though.

HOWEVER. We’re not here to discuss Rolaids or watering cans, Gentle Reader. It’s more about how in the depths of all of this shift and disruption and sorrow and unknowing and yes, fear, we can still find a working pole star. I was beginning to wonder, myself.

It seems odd that we have to go all the way, sometimes, into pain and Incredibly Poor Repetitive Decisions before the light dawns. (Especially if you think you’ve already done that…..) In dealing with that pain, it is possible (after what can seem like armed struggle) to get to a place where the pain itself moves into second place in one’s awareness. Then, if you can ride that wave a minute, you get to a place where you see that what you THINK about the pain or whatever it is has a lot to do with your experience of it. Moving right along, you see that what you THINK was most often taught to you in your early life- so you may think/believe/whateveritis things without even knowing why, or that you do think those things. Then, the fact that the body itself is tense and hard and maybe even twitching around gets you to base camp, in a sense. You can, in fact, breathe THROUGH this pain. Keep breathing. Put the thinking down, leave your opinions way behind (especially if they are about you or anyone in your immediate vicinity), and then…..it’s quiet. Open. There’s light for a moment and that allows for perspective. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Then the exciting part starts, when all the room the old opinions and fears and attitudes took gets freed up a bit? new things appear. You don’t have to be afraid, really. We’re here to learn and try to enjoy as much as possible. Turns out enjoyment really springs from love. Love is the answer to whatever may be bugging you, and the thing of it is to learn more about love. What IS the loving thing to do in a given situation? Usually it involves at least a tiny bit of You realizing the Other is YOU, too, and You are Other and the real answer to daily problems and struggles is to work on the solution, not on rehashing or blaming or any of the other things we all so often fall back on. Which involves love and breathing which get you to action, which we or at least I often seemed to think was in starting place. But it starts with love.

Which is not to say that I love Bloviating Pustule (long may he stay away), or the guy who called me a nasty name when, after he asked me, I expressed a positive opinion about June 19 being a national holiday in the U.S. Uhm, no. Not even. I’m still disgusted with what the country I live in has done through the years of its existence, I don’t like it and I work as much as possible to change things and provide whatever redress there might be for all those who….well. Were treated with such cruel inhumanity it’s hard to know what would balance things. I include rivers in this category too.

I have realized, though, that when I ground myself and proceed with the idea that we ARE all one, it is easier to deal with the flashpoints of reactivity and rage and poor driving. It’s a fire not to be fed by getting sucked into it. It’s more a situation of allowing space instead of anger and blame, and it turns out you can too figure out how to ask someone who’s yelling at you, calmly, what it’s all about. If the situation doesn’t involve someone having a psychotic break or drug derangement, it changes things somehow when someone slows down and speaks, and it is my feeling, not to mention enormous hope, that more and more of all of us are going out doing exactly that. Respect can always be present and that is important. There’s a change, and it is, however it may look now, I think a positive one. The old ways of dominion and power and duality are moving away, and it really is up to all of us to remember that we ARE moving toward a better reality, one based on proper interaction of all energies from the smallest speck of cosmic dust to the smile of a dog. One moment at a time.

Blessings and thanks. Take care of yourselves!

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embodying Newtonian mechanics

And that would be me doing that, Gentle Reader. Adding to my joy is WordPress’s new theoretically improved format experience. Somehow I can’t see how making you indicate you want a paragraph in a separate step each time you want one…..but. Ahem.

It’s been a long float in the Sargasso Sea, essentially. When you hear the adage about, unless you’re as motivated as a man with his hair on fire to find water, don’t start the process of whatever we might call it, but is essentially contacting the “one who knows”. It really DOES burn you entire and I suppose the only really strange thing is how long that can take. Especially when you think you’re actually doing just fine.

Of course, that doing fine is the constant running from your devils to which you have become accustomed. When that stops at long last, be prepared for some prolonged down time. So, as I continue to be a body at rest staying at rest, the following can be reported.

Spring really is beautiful. I’d never been up close enough to deciduous trees to see that it all begins with PINK. The tips of the branches have leaf rosettes that are the most amazing shade of pink, and the distance on the hills shimmers with it. With all the rain, the grasses have grown and are practically fluorescent, so the sight of pink pigs sailing through and baby goats toinking up from them is pretty spectacular. The Dog takes me (drags, actually) on lengthy expotitions to find poop spots….preferably with views. This has given me an amazing chance to see the wildflowers as they sprang up and finally! FINALLY! to identify which were shooting stars and which were saxifrage before the blossoms revealed their identities. I’m finding that this smaller world, which really is much larger than the “regular” one in truth, is just fine and I leave it less often and with more dismay. Still, one must provision one’s family and there is the monthly trip to the Dog Fan Club for dog food (last visit, the owner asked the guy waiting on us, as if he were giving an instruction, did you give him a treat? and the guy rolled his eyes and said: THREE. Charm, you know.) which is usually very enjoyable. The grocery store even becomes manageable when it is visited with less frequency. It’s all in how you look at it, of course, because in so many ways reality is fluid and in your eyes only from moment to moment. This is why, I suppose, the instruction on the search for the one who you know what’s is: keep your attention focused on the highest good, most light filled and loving paradigm you can.

Getting better at that, yes, but there ARE exceptions. Now that I have my “federally restricted” driver’s license, it’s even more fun than usual to perform routine tasks at the bank and elsewhere because people look at and say things like, are you a felon? and stuff like that. The level of distrust and paranoia among the citizenry of this country is astonishing, and fortunately I was able to laugh (a little. Cry a little too.) at my most recent interface with same. The bank I expect to be weird because banks are, at their heart, rather evil institutions- I mean, they have YOUR money, which THEY use, and you have to practically whistle a tune from an extraordinary orifice to get them to give it to you. No, the Post Office is where this week’s donnybrook was.

I have been sending my remedies out into the world for about twenty years now. One thing this means is I do know how to pack things, so they don’t break for the most part- in fact only twice in this whole time. The other day I went to mail two remedies to people and dogs, and ignored the bell that went off when I saw the words “delivery may be delayed in case of emergency”. No emergency here, thought I. WRONG. One package got diverted to the deep south when it was going to the east coast because it had been scanned…..and…..looked SUSPICIOUS. Marked fragile and all, too. When, in desperation, I went to the post office to enquire a Very Officious Post Mistress told me that most likely my MIA package had broken and contaminated other packages. After being scanned. Naturally there was a long line behind me so everybody in town heard this, more or less. I said, drawing myself up to my full tiny height, contaminated? I HARDLY THINK A BOTTLE OF HUMMINGBIRD ESSENCE IS GOING TO CONTAMINATE ANYTHING. AND IF IT BROKE IT’S CAUSE YOU GUYS BROKE IT WHEN YOU OPENED THE PACKAGE EXPECTING TO FIND AMMUNITION. Because this is an issue flower essence people contend with: the dropper bottles we use seem to remind postal scanners of bullets. And of course, only one bullet at a time gets mailed, right? Totally logical! I received a package from a fellow practitioner in Spain that took two extra weeks to arrive and was in total tatters when it did, because….it looked like…….and of course it had to be ripped open…and then…..and so on. There were intakes of breath, murmured whaaaaat’s, stunned silence from OPM, and of course me starting to laugh. A lot like the time in NAPA when I was on quest for fixative for rear view mirrors and the guy said, it’s called fixative for rear view mirrors. The Post Mistress naturally did not like my tone. Fair enough, I didn’t much care for hers either. She said, well you ADMITTED you mailed a BOTTLE. Luckily, standing by the list of proscribed mailing items, I said, gee. That’s not on here and how come nobody has ever mentioned this before? Also, although they both start with “b”, I did say bottle and not..well, you know. This is my teeny business, I said, and you are causing me distress and costing me money. Do, please, do what you can to expedite this process. I left feeling out of sorts but managed to remember that the last several months of walking through emotional/thought form ballistic gel has given me the ability to say, UH? we don’t need no stinking attitudes! so I assumed all would be well. Eventually. Saw pigs, goats, hawks and an incredible jasmine plant on the way home. All good.

And of course, whaddaya know? The package was delivered this afternoon. I am trying to hold this episode in my mind now when I feel all the ….ick….that comes from the current state of this country. If the post office can do it, it can be done. We’re not going to stay in this murk forever. The same is true for all of us in our individual experiences. It takes some doing but you can expand your horizons to include all the light you can, and cannot, see. One step at a time. Eventually I will have to start springing into action (the garden is literally tapping its foot out there, for example) but for now, basking in the light will do.

Blessings and thanks as always.

following the nose

In keeping with the spirit of the times we’ve been shifting and changing and tilting and whirling.  The Partner’s birthday came and went and on the whole? it was a success.  Roast chicken with herb butter, Popovers,  Mexican chocolate cake with coconut cream caramel frosting.  Yes.  If I say so myself.  The Dog got his current favorite treat, a Whimzees Vegetable Ear, and he also got some chicken breast wrapped in a bit of popover.

There was more to it, of course.  While The Dog zonked out in a blissful full stomach stupor, an injury the Partner had inflicted on himself a day or so before (to wit, whacking his knee with the wood maul) worked its way through his system and resulted in a seemingly strange symptom- lung congestion and the cough from infernal regions.  So we were up all night long and I wrestled, for the most part, with Dread and Powerlessness about once again entering the fray and trying to secure a doctor appointment while wondering what in the world to do NOW. ( This appointment business means dedicating a day to calling various and sundry official places and going through various and sundry assumptions of the position.) (A few days later I DID actually get this wrestled to the ground.)  I managed to get myself to a neutral position about it all, remembered to say the Cosmic Please and Thank you, and asked for some insight about this new and unwanted development.

In about an hour I opened my eyes but before that happened I saw a picture of what had possibly happened to the Partner’s lungs.  Reviewing my text book (because my brain is a literal sieve) I saw what had happened.  And, it had to do with the flow of energy through the body, as it goes through various meridians and organs.  The whack on the knee initially involved the movement of liver energy, which passes through the knee and ends where the lung energies begin to flow.  So we had an impingement on one flow that wasn’t usually problematic, but which went directly into one that has been a lifelong project, thereby creating a temporary blockage.  Adding to that the fact that the injury itself occurred at a time where another bodily energy was moving  which is not the strongest element in the P’s constitution, and? You have a disruption of the lung energy as it begins its circuit through the body.  And the infernal coughing began at the time the lung energies begin to move, and ended at the time they move into the next thing.  I was even able to explain this understandably.

The big thing about it though, over and above the fact that I finally, reflexively understood something I’ve been doing for a long time, was that the fear and anxiety level for both us was immediately gone.  We both understood what was going on, and what would be of assistance, and sure enough in another day or so, everything was fine.  And really there wasn’t anything “to do” except be kind to the affected areas, lessen inflammation and keep a good fluid intake going.

So of course I thought about it all.  Things that seem so intimidating, so complex at the outset really do open up with simple Attention.  When I initially began studying all these things, the plants and botany and anatomy and sidereal time and all the rest of it, I thought I must’ve been nuts to think I’d ever “get” it.  But something prevailed against that residual lack of confidence and now? Cake and understanding a cough in the same day? There’s hope, and it can be brought to life by just Letting It Be each time you think something is impossible or whatever word you use for OMGletmeoutofhere sorts of things.

Not to mention the other big thing which is the very imperative current necessity to disregard what seems like “truth” coming from what seems like “authority”.  The sense that you cannot handle whatever it is that is in front of you, and some larger “thing” is going to have to “do it” for you.  Or to you, or over you, or whatever.  As in, oh dear, we have to see a doctor and there are no doctors and this is going to be AWFUL. Or whatever the case may be.  “Things” seem so overwhelming it’s easy to let everything you see in a day bleed into everything else.  You know- terrorterrorterror, or whatever other fear inducing message is being murmured about.  In fact? Not so much.

SO.  It may have been the Partner’s birthday, but I feel like I’m the one who got the present.  Love and Understanding.  Not to mention dog kisses.

When Dogs Dream Big

The Dog is a prolific dreamer.  In his sleep, he RUNS, sometimes he SINGS, sometimes he TALKS. At length.  The most amazing, however, is when he wags his tail.  I kid you not, Gentle Reader, he actually wags his tail for extended periods during dreams.  We’re quite cheered by this sign of happiness although it is a bit startling in the middle of the night, especially if the tail turns out to be close to your head.  It’s also pretty amazing that he is so vocal, too, because he didn’t utter peep one for close to five months after he came.  Clearly, he tried not to cry, or cry out, and his little mouth would be set in stern effort, eyes squeezed shut.  We assumed he was working on the memories of how he came to be here in the first place.   (I gave him flower drops for all that– 5 Flower Formula, Snapdragon, and Peach, respectively-  and he got through it quite well and quickly, actually .) The only thing he’s done since the very first minute? is snore.  We fed him on the deck that first night, and after eating, he promptly flopped down, went to sleep, and snored.  At our feet.  We were hooked. When he started smiling, we were of course ecstatic although we did at times curse the unfair advantage Total Cuteness has.  And then he realized he could bark.  Fortunately he is not a compulsive barker and the first few times he did bark, he was quite surprised by it.  Now, when there are strange noises, he strides around huffing and puffing, and sounds EXACTLY like the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.  I picture him saying things like, “don’t make me kill again!” and the foundational “brace up!”. The high level hound-like piercing barks are of course saved for the times when I drop things, or trip, or have one of my daily multitudinous flambe situations.   Otherwise he is quite sparing with his comments, although he does seem to always have the last word/bark. We finally got him a small blue wading pool.  When his bright green round toy is in it and the water is shimmering above it,  it almost looks like a portal to another world.  He puts his head under the water and blows bubbles, which to me is further sign of wonderfulness.

So, between that and the fact that I saw 25 wild turkeys in a pasture this week, the challenges of the outside world although Big, were not Overwhelming.  Until today when numerous Lingering Fiascoes decided to coalesce into early morning  over thinking. SIGH.  But! I think we’re continuing to move forward.  I finally actually tackled one of my biggest long standing DUMB THINGS I DO.  Which is to water fruitless trees.

When I started training in Jin Shin Jyutsu, the teachers always told us not to water fruitless trees.  Being a past master at that I didn’t understand what they meant.  But I do now.  And what it means? is that giving and taking have to be in balance.  Respect has to be present.  And when something doesn’t come to life? Let it go.  In terms of healing, it means that the person who doesn’t really want to face the changes of getting well should start at another point, get ready, and THEN come to you. Kind of like writer’s block.  You take a walk and clear your head so that what’s in there can come out in some orderly fashion.  In terms of any relationships, it means that accepting the down position all the time, giving all the time and not receiving, is not good for anyone.  Period.  If people don’t appreciate what you offer, or want to take it with scarce acknowledgement, then you should move on.  Not in a negative way, just in the sense that life IS, and stuck ISN’T.  When Lady Bountiful steps toward you, it is often best to plead a prior engagement.  Hoping that something will turn into something totally different from what it really is, is not a good thing.  In fact, it is probably floating on that river in Egypt. Anyway? if it IS going to turn into something else, it’ll do it in its own good time so you need not waste your time trying to pull on the grass in order to make it grow faster.

So I made a decision in this vein.  It was surprisingly hard, and of course I didn’t exactly feel like a Brain Trust for having had it take this long.  But after a while, a big tight weight in my chest went away.  The hole it left was what occupied me this morning, and I realized that the ache from that is something that accompanies all healing, and it’s always scary since we think it means something’s amiss.  Instead it means things are very well, actually.  That, plus turkeys, plus dog bubbles? Is enough.  And also we are beginning embarkation on a long dreamed of project.  More on that to come!  Meanwhile, thank you.

success with pineapple

In all the excitement around here of late, I may have omitted proper treatment of one of my bigger accomplishments, Gentle Reader.

Which was the replication of an acceptable al pastor, for tacos.  Al pastor is one of those things I love deeply, sometimes even more than carnitas or rajas.  Naturally I was deterred from making it at home because you always see it being grilled on a rotisserie-like thing.  Which I don’t have.  So I thought, oh dearie me, too hard.

Well, not so much.  Turns out? all you really need is a good basic adobo recipe and PINEAPPLE.  It’s nice if you have the canned chiles en adobo but since I didn’t find mine until after I made the recipe, I can say it isn’t crucial.  You just then have to use a mix of roasted dried chiles and herbs and stuff, and the crucial pineapple, and whoosh it together…..and then you have a marinade to put on protein of your choice (I mean, in theory, you could use tofu- and tofu actually is not bad in rajas….) and……suddenly you find that you have accomplished something that seems huge.  And it’s basically just a recognition of what the elements of a thing actually are, and the relative sizes of them and you, and proceeding accordingly.

Bucked up by that glorious achievement, I have tried to approach the various and sundry things that seem to be hell bent on making me lose what little mind I have with what I am now calling The School of Pastor Approach.

In practice it’s kind of like stop, drop and roll in a fire.  Something happens, you pay attention to it, remain calm, and get out of harm’s way.  This means not losing even a tiny bit of composure which is always the part I struggle with: the inner Donald Duck.  In any case, the other day something happened which actually was pretty big.  I was taken aback by how quickly I went from zero to sixty on the Completely Upset Track.  (“I can’t do this” sort of thing.)

While the situation, had it been as bad as it might’ve been, was definitively not wonderful, it was also not as world ending as my feelings toward it indicated.  I realized that it was my attitude about it which was causing at least half of my distress.  Again.  This allowed me to calm down enough to not make things worse by untimely displays of inchoate emotion and yelling.  And to realize? that it was my expectation about what a given thing meant and thus should do that caused a relative inability to function.  Kind of like not being able to make pastor without a rotisserie.  Not, actually, the point.  What does this thing consist of, and how should it be approached?  How do I get on the right level here? In terms of pastor, the crucial thing is not the equipment, it’s the ingredients.  I suppose you could say the same thing of The Situation- it was the ingredients- the thinking- that made it seem impossible to navigate.  In the case of pastor, it was an addition (the sweet).  In the case of the Situation, it was a subtraction (the prickly bits- so pineapple still works as a metaphor!).  The thinking was the same, though, really.  I’m hoping this means progress has been made; over and above, that is,  the sheer joy of now being able to pretty much have pastor whenever I want.

Thank you!

crime and punishment

One thing about having read a lot is that one goes through periods where one book or another seems to be leaping into view, and refusing to sit down.   Lately it’s been Dostoyevsky.  Which, really? I can hardly believe I had the concentration to read his novels, much less retain the information.  I continue to be cowed by Moby Dick, but The Idiot and Crime and Punishment are lodged, forever, in my brain.  Weird.

So we were talking the other day about prison, and crime, and private prisons, and how it’s all kind of a tailor made situation, when you think about it,  for a) getting people deemed “undesirable” into confinement and out of general circulation b)which means some people make a lot of money running that confinement scenario, and the confinees find themselves in a condition similar to enslavement and c) there’s a place to funnel lots of people from the military into jobs overseeing the Other Confinees.  All the uncontrollable individuals are handled in one swell foop, with monetization to boot. An obvious oversimplification but then again.  There’s method to this madness.  As a place to put individuals whose “service” to their country has left them profoundly injured even while they still have to make a living, prison employment presents an option.  An out of sight, out of mind option, at that.  Then, there’s this. An overwhelming number of Americans are in prison.  An overwhelming number of those people are in prison for drug issues. ( It could be argued that aside from the burglary and robbery part, who really gets hurt by drugs?  The user.  And those who love that user.  Not something you’d think would call for imprisonment.) An overwhelming number of those people are not white.  An overwhelming number of laws differentiate between things that white people are likely to get arrested for (powder cocaine, let’s say) and black people are likely to get arrested for (crack, let’s say)- and which one has stiffer penalties I will leave to you to divine.  So there’s a mind numbing level of unfairness just built in to the whole system, not to mention the fact that people are being incarcerated for things that are not crimes but reactions to specific sets of circumstances, like poverty and joblessness and all the stuff that gets mentioned in passing as some sort of aberration, for which people are at fault.  Crimes, for which they must be Punished.

How Raskolnikov got jumbled into all this I can’t really say, but suddenly it all made a horrible sense.  Society as it has existed for the past couple of thousand years apparently has to have crime, and police, and lawyers and prisons and judges.  It seems at times that this is because the irrationality of the system itself is what has to be protected and concealed, because really maintaining function and order in society might well not involve incarceration and misery for so many.  The craziness at the top has to be disguised, at the least.  I mean, after all.  If you actually REALIZED the truth about it all, the reality that the controlling powers in the world not only do not have your best interests at heart but actually have nothing but their own hegemony and bank balances in mind, and your annihilation may fit nicely into that, how would that make you feel about the fact that you can’t find work to do?  In truth, your job has been moved away, condensed, disappeared, whatever it takes for profits to increase- it isn’t because “competition”, or because anything other than the greed and self interest of those “in charge”.  The fact that we’re swamped with “information” that is used as a paralyzing pacifier rather than an empowering tool, and part of that information seems to be that these age old paradigms must be maintained no matter what…..it really did make me think of the desperate Raskolnikov- looking for a feeling, an answer, some sense of his own existence and being.  And all he could come up with to do was, basically, take the breath away from someone else to make that happen.  But it didn’t really provide him with any information he could use, in the end.  It seems just like..right Now.

Then, yesterday as I was going to town, a ground squirrel darted in front of the car.  I didn’t want to hit it.  Simultaneously, a woman in a pickup came zooming up the road on the wrong side.  There I was, trying not to squish a squirrel nor get squished myself.  (This made me unaccountably think of Prince Myshkin.) Fortunately all was well, the brainless squirrel lived to dart again, and I managed to restrain myself from any rude gesturing at the other driver.  Which felt like massive progress.

It made me think, though, about how close we all are at every moment to complete and utter change, the unexpected, to death.  Or to grace and goodness, to joy.  It’s kind of, though, about dealing with all of that experience, tumult, whatever it is, without punishment, judgment, imprisonment, denial. It starts on a small, individual level and radiates into the whole of humanity.   It’s about changing the automatic, default setting on yourself to OBSERVE and LEARN from FEAR and REACT.  If I can keep myself from flipping someone off in traffic when they of course so richly deserve it, it’s possible to shift other unproductive actions as well.  A gradual standing up straight, opening of the hand and heart.  The more we hide things away, put people away, refuse to look, the more we are all in prison.  Perhaps it is that quality of vicious, entrapping circle that makes me think of Dostoyevsky’s novels- and the meeting of that quality with Heart and Soul which he did so wonderfully.

 

t’aint funny, mcgee

That phrase is from before even my time but it always made me laugh.  Until today, when I realized once and for all that? it really AIN’T FUNNY, and it is of course still largely about how you respond.

Setting aside the….spiderweb diagram of phone numbers I plowed through today trying to get a doctor appointment for the Partner.  We get assigned to a “practice” (and believe me, it IS practice, for them.) and that’s the only place we can go, per our insurance.  So that’s all fine and dandy until you live someplace like this, where: there aren’t hardly any doctors.  Apparently.  You thus get assigned to a practice and can’t go anywhere else, and you can’t be seen there because their “doors are closed to new patients” as they told me today.  Which is what the prior practice we were assigned to said. So your option is to go to the Emergency Room (and this does still make me laugh: what a misnomer! son of oxymoron) where they will do tests and stuff and then tell you? You have to be seen by a doctor.  So you’ve just wasted about 12 hours of your life and possibly contracted an incurable infection to boot.  And this is if you can be seen in the ER, because another thing that happens around here is chronic Code Black.  Because? No doctors.

In combination with everything else of late, this most recent development caused just….the…..teensiest…..SNAP.  But, soldiering on, I switched the coverage for the Partner to another option, having been told that with this, you can see “any doctor in California.”  The person who did the switching, (from a foreign country, and after a wait on hold full of advertisements for cable tv, car insurance, and Walmart) could give me no information of any kind whatsoever except that she’d done the switch.  That was helpful.  So net net, more phone calls more tooth gnashing and then the light bulb went off.  You still have to be assigned to a practice with this “new” coverage and can’t go anywhere else, yes. Nothing like everyone being on the same page even if they don’t know what book they’re in. But it doesn’t have to be in the same county as you are.  Thus, with the probably very last two synapses in my bomb blast of a brain, I thought: Let’s get him assigned to a Specialist! That’s what he needs!  Because surely, God, there must be doctors in some adjacent county. Mustn’t there?  A search turned up said doctors in said “specialty”.  I felt like I had just wrestled Godzilla to the ground, because even though it will be another ten days before we get the paperwork, and he will be assigned to yet some other place that won’t see us, we can request a provider and be assigned thereto.  At least that’ s what they said.  Then it will be a mere 100 mile drive.  But hey.  Lemons, lemonade, yes?

But wait, there’s more.  I unfortunately turned the news on to the continuing reports on the Khan debacle.  AND:

1. The New Yorker had a recent article about an Afghan immigrant named: KHAN, who ultimately found his way to Wyoming where he sold tamales.  He was totally beloved by the tri county area he lived in, and? Came here long before..that person, cause of said debacle, who is running for President on the Republican ticket’s family ever did.  Also another relative founded the Joffrey Ballet.  So I just have to wonder why all of a sudden everybody acts like having Muslim American citizens is like a recent and terrifying visitation from Mars.  Instead of what it is: People simply trying to create decent lives for themselves and their families and as a corollary? Their communities. Why is this history being re-written? Wait.  Did I just say that? Naivete rears its silly head again.
2. I read a blog yesterday by a blogger I generally like very much.  This was about current politics, feminism, the Presidential election.  Weirdly, the whole thing left me cold and oddly, I found, reactive.  Because on the whole, I realized the tone was grating to me. I fought many of those hoary battles for basic equity for women.  These battles have meant that many younger women have been spared the more grotesque situations of yesteryear. They do not, thus, seem to realize that it is still all vitally at stake. ( And really? One more reference to feminists as  women who didn’t shave their armpits and I am going to scream.)  Plus I find at this point that I am a bit taken aback by anyone who looks at this election situation, and can’t stand up and say, ya know? I’m not crazy about Hillary but I am not voting for someone who to all appearances IS crazy and whom we know is dishonest and disrespectful.  Because we are at a rather watershed point, and while in some circles it’s fashionable to say, oh, let it all blow up, change is inevitable, it won’t make any difference, it’s political, or whatever….that is abdicating one’s responsibility as a human being which even if we shift dimensions we will still, with my luck,  retain.  And to pay no more attention to matters like who is going to “run” the country you live in than seems apparent when no thoughtful comments are made on the subject, is also abdicating one’s responsibility.  Which of course leads to:
3. I realized that all of this is simply: my tiny human body’s opinion.  So I turned again to investigate the attitudinal issue.  Always good fun.  And what this (unmentionable) individual cited above has in common with my doctor appointment struggles is this.  Both things make me feel out of control, powerless, and frustrated beyond tolerance.  Both things represent, on some quotidian level, exactly what is not right with the world now.  There is no accountability and people really don’t matter a whole lot once you get out in the bush.  We’re all right on the edge.
4. When on the edge, it’s good to stop.  It’s good to think about how you got there, and do you really want to jump? or do something else.  Silence in the cranium, please, in other words.  I stopped, and it really was best.  I was able to avoid posting a comment on the aforementioned blog, which I really do like very much, that would not have accomplished anything constructive in the long run since I was so reactive.  I was able to stop and think, well, this doctor thing hasn’t worked the way we were doing it.  How ELSE might I approach this.  In both cases, much more satisfactory results.  And, anyway.  If I want to point out how dangerously close we are to lighting the firecrackers on every feral cat tail in the world by not standing up and saying that…Trump is unacceptable, on human terms, and should not be pandered to? So far I can still do that.  But after having, at least, THOUGHT about it in relative calm, and having not interfered with another person’s ability to do the same thing as they see fit.  Win win, even if temporarily.

Thank you, as always, for reading.  I appreciate it very much — it helps to know that one is not the only bear left standing. And I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to know there are More Dog Pictures coming.  Now that, GR, is something to look forward to.

a bright spot

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, right? Something splendidly reassuring?

As may have been apparent, things have been On Fire lately.  I have been in a rather dark spot looking for a hose and trying to keep up with my chores, not to mention getting all the dragons and elephants in my head to either learn how to dance or leave, thank you.

In the midst of all this, the Partner has been ill for the past several days.  He has a  chronic project, with which in my opinion we are making progress, but which is challenging to deal with and a  bummer, on the whole.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

So we get to this morning, and a moderate, but far from complete, improvement. In reasonable time, to my mind.  In my daily runthrough about current vitals, I ask the Partner if he feels certain things, obscure yes but powerful and describable.   He lifts his head, looks me square in the eye, and says: HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?  Because usually, of course, when I ask him questions about how he feels he responds with ultra descriptive things like: sore, sick, tired, or my all time favorite, I don’t know. So it on some level has not got much to do with what he himself describes verbally, figuring out what’s happening.  It is not, then, unusual to have to proceed on meager  pickings.

But this, Gentle Reader, is pretty much what everyone says to me (with a sense of FINALLY! SOMEBODY GETS IT! HECK! I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT. YOU’RE RIGHT.)  How do I know that? and, Work your magic for me.  I naturally feel that it’s no big thing, just something observable. However. To have someone so close to me (and thus really be harder to work with than someone I don’t know, oddly but there it is) have the same experience and sense of…????…was like having a bright light shine on the dragon/elephant room and having them all behave as they file off to sunnier climes, waving goodbye.   It was like getting some incontrovertible truth demonstrated: this is what you ARE and it is really OK.   And that’s today’s good news, which is more than enough to get me back in the saddle.

in another part of the empire

I’m often struck by how, in the end, so many basic concepts- political, religious, behavioral- get argued about even though the arguers in point of fact share the exact same view, just in different words.  There’s a great African story about this.  One day a God, being the usual god-like shit disturber (and male, FYI), decided to walk down a road which separated the fields of two villages.  He painted one side of his body blue, and the other red.  He was big, too.  Probably radiant.

So there he is walking down the road humming a song he was working on, and the villagers are out pulling weeds and thinking of witty ripostes as we all do at such times.  Suddenly someone looks up, says OMG!! THERE’S GOD!! AND HE’S BLUE!! at precisely the same time someone on the other side of the road says, OMG!!! THERE’S GOD!!!! AND HE’S RED!!!!!

Shouts and jostling ensue, and things are getting tense.  What does the God do?  He walks back up the road, the other way this time, so that?  The colors are exactly opposite.  Which leads to anguished howls of OMG!! THEY WERE RIGHT!! GOD’S (whatever color)!! answered by, OMG!! THEY WERE RIGHT AND NOW…THEY’RE SAYING WE’RE RIGHT…AND….net net the villagers swarmed over the road and began flailing gardening tools about wildly at each other.  Because God, right?

Finally, having gotten a little bored with this exercise, the God stands in such a way that everyone can see all of him.  YOU BIG SILLIES,he says, or words to that effect.  OMG. GOD IS GREAT AND MULTICOLORED. NOW WE HAVE TO GO BACK TO PULLING WEEDS, the villagers all say, or words to that effect, and which ones were grateful and which ones wanted to go back and fight is left to your imagination.  It is indicated, however, that some of the villagers actually realized on the spot that it didn’t make a bit of difference what color God was or is.  The incredible thing is that such a being exists at all, and that is amazingness enough to take a lifetime to truly understand and act upon. Also? God has a wicked sense of humor, which means that both those who lack compassion AND those without humor are pretty far from the tee, or weed patch, they’re supposed to be on.  One can only assume both villages did something like comedy competitions for a while to hone their humor skills after being taken in so completely.  Yah, they’d probably say.  So and so! What a goof! Started a whole new religion with a PURPLE God!! hahahaha…..

So it is with many things.  I was at my landlady’s after the Primary election, and met her gentleman friend, who told me, YUP. I’M A CONSERVATIVE and you KNOW WHAT? They tried to keep me from voting, saying I had no party preference!  Didn’t want any votes for Trump!  Given that this place is a reactionary hotbed, I murmured, I have a hard time understanding that but whaddaya know?  They did the same thing to ME.  It was one of those moments where the red and blue of God were quite visible and it is, albeit remotely, possible that some kind of meeting of the minds in compromise was reached on a few “conservative topics”.  This sort of thing always makes me reach for the tequila but there is just so much of it right now that I’ve had to break down and stick to water.  Still- it is a bit easier to navigate these shark, rock, crocodile, rocket launcher and yeti//bigfoot infested waters of the now when you can remember that really, we are all talking about the same thing.  It may be that some simply don’t know who or what they are, and maybe they never will given an intense attachment to STUFF and therefore a corollary lack of care for  PEOPLE, and so they think their language is the only one and refuse to listen to anyone who says, look! God was blue and now he’s red! even when they can see the same thing with their own eyes. (I think Marx and Engels referred to this as false class identification…) Nonetheless, it really is both/and, not either/or, or even worse neither/nor.  Regardless of whether you see the whole face or not.

And in truly exciting news, we have a shower for the first time since we’ve been here, thank you Partner!!!  I had forgotten how wonderful showers are.  Another reminder about what really matters, and mostly it is the simple things, adequate shelter, decent food, and beyond that the ability to appreciate the world and express love in it.  While remembering all the different words for same, of course……

picking up the pieces

Good lord, Gentle Reader.  I completely lost it last night after seeing, yet again, a shameless, depraved, pointless and nasty execution on the evening news.  For a minute I thought I might be “getting used to” this stuff, but.  NO.  NO.  It is time, Gentle Readers, to stand up and say absolutely not, no more, get your heads out of the paper bags and think.  Living as we do in a place where people snarf around about second amendment rights and how “law abiding citizens are being turned into criminals” with “background checks required!”, it never goes too well when I ask what about your basic right to life?  What about your basic right not to get shot dead by someone just because they can?  The out of control emotion in the voices of the shooting officers sounds to me as though they are too unbalanced to be performing their duties.  What about that? Those who protect and serve all too often ignore and ravage and aren’t even as mentally well adjusted as the perps they arrest.  What has happened to people?  I walked into the garden and just stood there last night.  Wondering what I can do about all this.

So, today when an Adele song came on the radio as I was driving home from a lengthy waste of time cum frustrating ritual public humiliation (Medical tests needed.  Medical tests not paid for by my “insurance”. No medical tests for you, in that case, so bye bye.  All of it happening in full view of a dozen or so people.) it seemed not unreasonable to burst into tears in the privacy of the Trusty Subaru.  And, bursting into tears can be quite therapeutic- it gets the static out of your wavelength, and then you can, from a calmer state of being, approach whatever it is that’s making you cry.  At least that’s what I tell myself.  So it’s just pretty strange, because while I KNOW that it is all energy and all moving in the direction it is intended to move, and that knowing gives me a degree of peace…at the same time? It just seems to all be blowing up as we speak and it’s indeed hard to keep the faith.  Of course that just makes it more necessary.  So I’ll do what I always do in these drastic moments: cook.  And say some prayers for all of those grieving for their loved ones, everywhere. My hope is we can all put down our anger, and pick up Love wherever it was last seen.

Thank you.